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Californian love turns cold: owners abandon chihuahua pets

SAN FRANCISCO: If every dog has its day, the chihuahua's, it seems, may be on the wane.

San Francisco animal shelters and rescue groups are reporting a surge in the number of abandoned petite pooches.

"All the shelters in California are seeing an upswing in chihuahua impounds," said Deb Campbell, a spokeswoman for the city's animal care and control department. "It's been a slow and steady climb ... We call it the Paris Hilton syndrome."

A third of the dogs held at the city shelter are all or part chihuahua. New ones have come in every day for the past year. If the trend continues, officials said, the shelter would become 50 per cent chihuahua within months.

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There are so many chihuahuas in Los Angeles city shelters that the animal services agency flew 25 last week to Nashua in New Hampshire, where the local Humane Society found all of them homes within a day. The operation was funded by the actress Katherine Heigl and the Jason Debus Heigl foundation.

Gail Buchwald, from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals adoption centre in New York, calls California's chihuahua oversupply unusual. Her shelter does not have a single chihuahua.

Animal lovers blame Hollywood for California's surplus. The pint-sized pups grew more popular after Reese Witherspoon's character in the 2001 movie Legally Blonde accessorised her wardrobe with a chihuahua. Hilton's dog, Tinkerbell, was a regular on the reality TV series The Simple Life.